Jerry Needham: Organizing a Protest

About a dozen people – mostly members of the Southwest Workers Union – gathered with protest banners Wednesday outside the offices of the Air Force agency responsible for cleaning up the pollution at the former Kelly AFB.

They were raising a ruckus again about the quality of the cleanup in light of a new federal scientific report that urges the EPA to tighten standards for tetrachloroethylene or TCE, one of the main pollutants involved at Kelly. The newspaper wrote about that report and its potential implications for the Kelly cleanup last week. (See story).

The union members and three neighborhood residents were asking for free health monitoring and health care for the neighborhood from the Air Force due to health problems they believe are caused by Kelly pollution.

They also want the Air Force Real Property Agency to voluntarily produce a cleanup plan to reduce TCE levels in the contaminated plume of off-base groundwater to 1 part per billion instead of the 5 ppb currently required. And they said they want it done immediately instead of the 20 to 25 years planned.

They didn’t really have any solid ideas about how that should be done. The Air Force has said that the only real way to rapidly get the pollution out of the groundwater in the neighborhood is to put in a massive system of pump-and-treat wells. That say that would be costly and disruptive with many streets torn up to put in pipes and noisy wells pumping 24 hours a day.

Residents in a series of meetings several years ago indicated they didn’t want that disruption, so a more passive system involving the two underground walls of iron filings was put in along with pump-and-treat wells along the base boundary.

The AFRPA had no comment about the protest but issued a news release saying it’s satisfied with the progress of the cleanup and committed to the protection of public health.